‘I imagine as locals you’re all familiar with the area – anyone not?’

All shook their heads, one managing to do that while chugging from a water bottle at the same time.

‘Smithy, good to see you multitasking!’ Taylor ribbed.

The wiry DC, Darrell Smith, had a naturally furtive face, with permanently half-closed eyes, giving him the deceptive appearance of dozing. Removing the bottle from his lips, he replied in a slow, pedantic voice that belied his sharp brain, ‘It’s a new skill I’ve learned – I can drink and listen at the same time.’

‘And this from a bloke who six months ago couldn’t suck mints and walk at the same time!’ quipped ‘Long Tom’ Thompson, who was a shade over five foot seven.

Taylor, smiling, looked back at the display. ‘The house ringed is the Paternosters’. Niall Paternoster, the subject, is about to appear.’ He pressed a button in the remote, starting the recording again, and a skip truck passed. A moment later, a muscular man with tousled hair and bulging arms, wearing a T-shirt, shorts and flip-flops and carrying two seemingly weighty carrier bags, stepped into view, hurrying across the road and making for one of the brick-faced houses.

Taylor froze the image, then zoomed in close so that Paternoster and the bags he was carrying were in clear focus. Then he looked inquisitively at his team. ‘Anyone tell me what you can figure out from this image?’

‘That he’s ugly with bad hair?’ said a shaven-headed man, nicknamed Hulk.

‘I’m looking for something a little more worthy of your detective brains,’ Taylor said, acknowledging Hulk with a faint grin.

‘The shopping bags, sir?’ suggested Lucy Arndale, nicknamed Frog Girl after once spending almost two days and nights semi-submerged in reeds at the edge of a river, waiting for a drugs drop.

‘Go on,’ Taylor encouraged her.

The slight woman in her late twenties, with shoulder-length brown hair and thin lips, said, ‘Those are Waitrose carrier bags, sir.’

‘Good shout,’ Taylor said. ‘And your point is?’

‘Waitrose has a reputation for quality, but also as being one of the most expensive grocery store chains in the UK. So, I’m immediately wondering, if Niall Paternoster is struggling for money, what’s he doing shopping in Waitrose?’

Smithy shot up his hand. ‘Boss, could it not simply be that this store is the closest to his home? So he went there for convenience and hang the cost?’

‘I’d buy the convenience angle,’ Taylor responded. ‘But he could have jumped into his car and, for the minimal expense of his petrol, made big savings from buying at Tesco or Sainsbury or Lidl or Iceland. So for a man so short of money, doesn’t Waitrose seem a little extravagant?’

‘Perhaps he’s celebrating the end of his austerity, sir,’ Lucy Arndale posited. ‘He thinks, in his small mind, that he’s successfully murdered his wife, with nothing to connect him to her killing, and now the house and whatever cash she has are going to be his to enjoy – with his girlfriend, perhaps the lady he’s suspected of meeting at the Devil’s Dyke car park last Sunday evening?’